I hand him a paper napkin from the table. “I like strange,” I say.
He takes the napkin and dabs at his face. “Oh, thank God, because tucking in my tail gets very uncomfortable after an hour or so.”
“You’re funny,” I say. “Genuinely, I’m having a good time.”
Jake balls the napkin and then he closes the notebook and tucks it back into his pocket. “Excellent,” he says. “Same here.”
We discover over the course of dinner that we are both fans ofShakespeare, that we love green apples but not Fujis, and that we are both night owls.
“Too many activities value early risers,” Jake says. “Jobs, gyms, farmers markets. Even hikers in LA judge you if you get there past nine.”
I lift my drink. “Hear! Hear!”
“There should be an evening farmers market for people like us where the latest arrivals get the best things.”
“I like the way you think.”
“I’m glad.” He smiles. “So what’s your job like?”
Jake’s on his second margarita, and his cheeks are a bit flushed. It’s endearing. It’s been a while since I encountered a man who couldn’t hold his booze.
My job is a little bit of everything. It is chaotic, sometimes toxic, fun, infuriating, and most importantly, flexible. Which is exactly how I’d describe my boss, too.
“Irina is a little nuts,” I say. “But I like her. Or, I get her, maybe, is a better way to put it.”
“Kendra told me she once made her go through trail mix and pick out only the peanuts? Why not just buy peanuts?”
I shrug. “She likes the overall trail mix flavor. You can’t argue that they don’t taste different.”
“You pick out her peanuts?”
I laugh. “No way,” I say. “Kendra still comes over for that.”
To be honest, none of it seemed that crazy to me. Over the course of the past three years, Irina and I had developed a rhythm. I knew how she took her coffee from every chain on the planet (oat milk misto at Starbucks, oat flat white at Coffee Bean, black coffee with steamed oat milk from Peet’s), that all of her groceriesshould be organic but if they weren’t, she wouldn’t actually care. That she liked to use miles to upgrade but if you couldn’t guarantee an upgrade, you should book first class. That you could schedule meetings for the morning but they’d never go well, and that every hotel she stayed in had to have a gym. In exchange she didn’t question if I needed Friday off, or came into work at eleven on a Monday.
We had the unicorn of all relationships in Hollywood: a functional female-female one, with a power dynamic at play, to boot.
“She’s just particular,” I say. “But aren’t we all?”
Jake seems to give this more consideration than I feel is necessary. “I don’t think I’m that particular,” he says finally.
“Really.”
“You’re judging me.”
I pick up a corn chip and spoon some salsa on top. “I’m not.”
“You are,” he says. “You’re doing that thing with your eyebrows.”
“What thing?”
“There’s a thing,” he says. He points to the space right above the center of his eyebrows, and wiggles them.
I snort out a laugh, and some salsa gets stuck. I take a big gulp of water.
“I am judging you,” I say once I’ve swallowed.
“I know,” he tells me. “But I don’t mind as much as you’d think.”
